Tag Archives: Farmers’ Market

In the days of film, there was negative making (“shooting”) and printmaking (“printing”). With digital, nothing has changed, the image is captured/created, then processed into a final product.

This means that sometimes you can find an old image you weren’t fond of and re-imagine the processing to get something you do. This was shot on Ilford FP4+, scanned as a negative, and processed digitally. Call it whatever you want, but it’s just stage one from one process and stage two from the other.

One of my favorite things about the infamous shower scene in Psycho is the way that Hitchcocks’ careful camera work literally cuts Janet Leigh (as Marion Crane) into pieces. The audience goes from visuals of the rising and falling knife to individual pieces of Leigh’s body. At least in an impressionistic sense, she is being vut into pieces.

Photography can work much the same way. The camera can take a larger phenomenon (in this case, a farmers’ market) and cut it into the little pieces that hold it together. This particular slice is a box of extra bears full of honey that a vendor had stashed in the back of his Jeep.

Can you tell what’s wrong with this image? Does the nose look a little funny? Sometimes it seems like the better you get one thing, the more likely you are to completely miss another. In this case, I nailed the focus. For traditional shots of people or pets (or really anything with eyes), the rule of thumb is to make sure the focus is sharp on the eyes (or on the nearer eye). I nailed the focus. Unfortunately, I forgot to consider depth of field: Since I was only a matter of inches away from this face (probably something I should think about when it belongs to a strange dog) and shooting at a relatively open aperture (most likely f/4), my depth of field was quite thin. How thin? Follow the contours of the head forward or back from the eyes and see how quickly they go out of focus.

Oh well. I think this will still make a nice 8×10. I ordered my first professional lab prints earlier today, and I am curious to see how they turn out. The best part is, the price is comparable to Ritz or CVS, or maybe even less (I paid $2 for 8x10s and $3 for 8x12s). It’s even more convenient. Unless you’re one of “those people” who hoard images on their SD cards and go to the grocery store to make prints before deleting images when it gets full, it’s much more convenient to export them from your photo management software, upload them, and place your order. I am curious to see the results.

Agfa APX400, Ricoh KR-5 Super II, normal developent in F76+ and the great tonality I have gound with this combo, even when scanned. Sure beats the FP4+ I tried during this project, which was both expensive and disappointing.

Basically, the reason I haven’t been posting my photographs is that I myself have had no access to them. I tried shooting digital for a while (the previous three entries), but it wasn’t inspiring. So instead, negatives have piled up with no way to print or scan them. A brief bright spot occurred, however, when I was able to justify some good ol’ black and white shooting for a project I was working on (trust me, the justification was pretty tenuous). It sure was expensive though: Five scans destined for 8x10s and 8x12s cost me $23. For five scans. Not including the price of film, developing, printing, and shipping the prints, that’s $5.75 each. Just for scanning. Regardless, here is the first in all of its glory. Enjoy.